The establishment of an emergency communication constitutes an important step in efficiently providing emergency services, including police, fire and rescue services and emergency medical services. For instance, establishing an emergency communication may be of paramount importance to providing emergency medical care after a car accident. In order to reduce the time required for rescue squads to reach the accident site, it has been envisaged to provide a system where an emergency communication would be automatically established by a vehicle when an accident occurs. For instance, an emergency communication may be automatically established when airbag sensors are triggered. In an exemplary situation, a mobile phone in the form of an in-vehicle system (IVS) may automatically establish an emergency communication and may transfer information about the accident, such as the position of the vehicle, time stamps, and vehicle type, to a PSAP or TPSC.
In the context of creating 3GPP standards, it has been proposed to use a specific in-band modem for emergency communications to transmit a minimum set of data (MSD) from an IVS to a PSAP. However, it has been observed that setting up an emergency communication, including sending the MSD, using in-band signalling through the voice channel is inflexible. Furthermore, the deployment of such a mechanism would be expensive. Indeed, the deployment would imply modifying the existing mobile and wire line networks to allow the in-band modems to operate appropriately.
It has therefore been proposed to use an enhanced short message service (SMS) to transmit the MSD from an IVS to a PSAP. More background information on the enhanced SMS solution and its advantages may be found in Tdoc S4-100940, “eCall: Remarks, Questions and Alternative”, 3GPP TSG-SA4 #61, 8-12 Nov. 2010, Barcelona, Source: Telefon AB LM Ericsson, ST-Ericsson SA. Further background may be found in international application WO 2009/151395 A1.
It is desirable to provide methods, apparatuses and computer programs to improve the technical infrastructure for supporting emergency communications and thus assisting rescue squads in quickly, efficiently and appropriately reacting to emergency situations. It is further desirable to fulfil this aim while taking into account the need for reliability and computational efficiency, as well as the aim to reduce the network infrastructure costs and the operational and maintenance costs.